The Great Disconnect

‘I Am the Change’ by Charles R. Kesler

Once upon a time there was a radical president who tried to remake American society through government action. In his first term he created a vast network of federal grants to state and local governments for social programs that cost billions. He set up an imposing agency to regulate air and water emissions, and another to regulate workers’ health and safety. Had Congress not stood in his way he would have gone much further. He tried to establish a guaranteed minimum income for all working families and, to top it off, proposed a national health plan that would have provided government insurance for low-income families, required employers to cover all their workers and set standards for private insurance. Thankfully for the country, his second term was cut short and his collectivist dreams were never realized.

His name was Richard Nixon.

Whenever conservatives talk to me about Barack Obama, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. But what exactly? The anger, the suspicion, the freestyle fantasizing have no perceptible object in the space-time continuum that centrist Democrats like me inhabit. What are we missing? Seen from our perspective, the country elected a moderate and cautious straight shooter committed to getting things right and giving the United States its self-­respect back after the Bush-Cheney years. Unlike the crybabies at MSNBC and Harper’s Magazine, we never bought into the campaign’s hollow “hope and change” rhetoric, so aren’t crushed that, well, life got in the way. At most we hoped for a sensible health care program to end the scandal of America’s uninsured, and were relieved that Obama proposed no other grand schemes of Nixonian scale. We liked him for his political liberalism and instinctual conservatism. And we still like him.

But more than a few of our fellow citizens are loathing themselves blind over Barack Obama. Why? I need a level-headed conservative to explain this to me, and Charles R. Kesler seems an excellent candidate. An amiable Harvard-­educated disciple of the conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, an admirer of Cicero and the founding fathers and Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan, he teaches at Claremont ­McKenna College and is the editor of The Claremont Review of Books, one of the better conservative publications. It is put out by the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, an increasingly influential research group that also runs educational programs for young conservatives of a Tea Party bent. The Claremont Review doesn’t like Obama one bit. But it has usually taken the slightly higher road in criticizing him, and when Kesler begins his book by dismissing those who portray the president as “a third-world daddy’s boy, Alinskyist agitator, deep-cover Muslim or undocumented alien” the reader is relieved to know that “I Am the Change” won’t be another cheap, deflationary ­takedown.

Instead, it is that rarest of things, a cheap inflationary takedown — a book that so exaggerates the historical significance of this four-year senator from Illinois, who’s been at his new job even less time, that he becomes both Alien and Predator. Granted, there is something about Obama that invites psychological projection, notably by Scandinavians bearing gifts. But Kesler outdoes the Nobel Prize committee by raising the Obama presidency to world-historical significance, constructing a fanciful genealogy of modern liberalism that begins just after the French Revolution in the works of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel; passes through Karl Marx and Charles Darwin and Oswald Spengler; and culminates in . . . “The Audacity of Hope” and 2,000-plus pages of technical jargon in the Affordable Care Act.

It’s some performance, and actually quite helpful. A sense of proportion, once the conservative virtue, is considered treasonous on the right today, and Kesler cannot be accused of harboring one. But his systematic exaggerations demonstrate that the right’s rage against Obama, which has seeped out into the general public, has very little to do with anything the president has or hasn’t done. It’s really directed against the historical process they believe has made America what it is today. The conservative mind, a repository of fresh ideas just two decades ago, is now little more than a click-click slide projector holding a tray of apocalyptic images of modern life that keeps spinning around, raising the viewer’s fever with every rotation. If you want to experience what it’s like to be within that mind on a better day, then you need to visit “I Am the Change.”

Let’s start the slide show. The Obama story begins with Professor Hegel, who had this new idea back in old Berlin. Looking down at history from an Olympian distance, and with Olympian heartlessness, he believed it showed the progressive development of human nature toward absolute freedom. This freedom, he thought, developed through the State, though, not against it. This meant that history’s task would be complete only when the State coordinated the basic machinery of life, from the economy to politics, through a professional bureaucracy staffed by specialized experts trained at modern universities. Though all the bad stuff in 20th-century European history derives from Hegel’s idea, according to Kesler, servile Europeans still hold to it.

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America is different, or used to be. It was founded on the older idea that human beings have a fixed set of natural rights and that the fixed role of government is simply to secure those rights, otherwise leaving people to take care of themselves. This is not to say that young America was some libertarian Eden. It was bound together by common ideas of the best (Christian) life, the public good, democratic duty and good manners. It was also bound together by Abraham Lincoln — the great hero of Claremont conservatism — who preserved the Union by defending the inflexible moral idealism of the Declaration of Independence. Abe bequeathed to us a nation like none other, not a State like every other.

Then it all went to hell. The steps were small, as they always are on the road to serfdom. That’s why the first one is so decisive. The person who enticed us along this path has a lot to answer for, and his name was. . . .

Intermission: Conservatives have always been great storytellers; it is their fatal weakness. They love casting their eyes back to the past to avoid seeing what lies right under their noses. The story always involves some expulsion from Eden, whether by the hippies of the 1960s, or the suffragists, or the wretched refuse of the shtetls, or the French Revolution, or the Enlightenment, or Luther, or Machiavelli or the sack of Rome. Next thing you know they’ll be repeating Mallarmé’s judgment that “all poetry has gone wrong since the great Homeric deviation.” (He was only half joking.) The point is, the conservative apocalypse has always been a movable one. So the suspense builds as the reader asks himself: Whom will Charles Kesler blame? Back to the show.

His name was . . . Woodrow Wilson. For some years now the Claremont Institute has been promoting the idea that Wilson was a kind of double agent, whipping the Huns in World War I while surreptitiously introducing the Hegelian bacillus into the American water supply and turning us into zombie-slaves of an elite-run progressivist State. Glenn Beck popularized the notion among grass-roots conservatives by placing Wilson at the center of his Jackson Pollock blackboards, with spokes running out to Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, Saul Alinsky, Acorn, George Soros, Cass Sunstein and now I’m forgetting who else. Kesler gives us a more sober account of what Wilson wrought.

The history books tell us that the Progressive Era began in the 1890s, when all sorts of little reform and good-­government groups began popping up to fight corruption, clean up the slums and rein in the banks and trusts. Kesler, though, sees two opposing tendencies at work back then. One was populist, like the Tea Party; it distrusted business and government equally and wanted to return power to the people by adhering to strict constitutional principles. The other was an elite, paternalistic movement led by self-appointed reformers who ran roughshod over the Constitution in order to “modernize” the state as they saw fit. The Populists loved America, the Progressives not so much. “Before the left’s avant-garde became captivated by the Soviet Union,” Kesler informs us, “it fell in love with Germany.”

Woodrow Wilson, who openly confessed to reading German, was a sterling example of this type. While Progressive activists were preaching the Social Gospel and building settlement houses, Professor Wilson of Princeton University was engaged in genuine revolutionary activity — writing books. He wondered out loud whether American political institutions, based on the framers’ 18th-century mechanistic ideas, were adapted to the modern age; he also had some nice things to say about German notions of public administration. In fact one of his books, ominously titled “The State,” was, according to Kesler, “designed to assist students who lacked German and Germanic attention spans.”

Kesler is an accomplished player of two conservative parlor games: Cherchez le Kraut and Whac-a-Prof. But he, too, is a professor; and as a follower of Leo Strauss, he has also absorbed a lot of German assumptions about how Big Ideas get born in the mind of a single thinker and march their way through history. So it’s pretty amusing to see how, after railing against Hegel’s myth of fated historical progress, he proceeds to construct an inverted myth of fated historical decline once Wilson bore Hegel’s love-child. Kesler’s history of Progressivism doesn’t involve real public figures making real choices about real policies under real constraints in real time. It follows the determined historical journey of the Progressive Idea in words, from the New Freedom platform of Wilson’s first campaign, down through the New Deal speeches of Franklin Roosevelt (who spoke German as a child), then to Lyndon Johnson’s announcements of the War on Poverty and the Great Society. Once that rhetorical lineage is established, he then tries to show how the Idea spread out into American culture at large, bringing with it existentialist self-absorption, moral relativism and passivity in the face of the new administrative state, so that by the midcentury we nearly became Europeans (only fatter). That is when “it fell to Ronald Reagan to help restore Americans’ confidence in themselves, which he did in the name not of liberalism but of ­conservatism.”

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John Fulbrook III

There is, of course, a real story here, but also a much simpler, Idea-Frei way of telling it. Yes, the hydra-headed Progressive movement, resisting varied but real economic threats to democratic self-­government, did extend the jurisprudential limits of government activity in ways that were wise and sometimes not so wise. Yes, the New Deal did convince Americans that citizens are not road kill and that government can legitimately protect public welfare and basic human dignity. And yes, the Great Society’s liberal architects vastly overreached and overpromised, destroying the public’s confidence in active government and threatening the solid achievements of the New Deal and the Progressive Era.

This more modest narrative used to convince conservatives, and still does convince centrist liberals like me who cringe at the name McGovern. And Ronald Reagan plays a big role in it. Reagan did in fact restore (then overinflate) America’s self-confidence, and he did bequeath to Republicans a clear ideological alternative to Progressivism. But he also transformed American liberalism. As an author named Barack Obama once wrote, Reagan “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” By delegitimizing Great Society liberalism and emphasizing growth, he forced the Democratic Party back toward the center, making the more moderate presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama possible. Reagan won the war of ideas, as everyone knows.

Except conservatives. The most important thing I learned from Kesler’s book is just how large a stake conservatives have in convincing themselves and voters that Reagan failed. Think about it: if they conceded ideological victory they would have to confront the more prosaic reasons that entitlements, deficits and regulations continue to grow in Republican and Democratic administrations alike. They would be forced to devise a new, forward-looking agenda to benefit even their own constituencies, like ensuring that American business can draw on an educated, healthy work force; can rely on modern public infrastructure; and can count on stable, transparent financial markets. And they would have to articulate a conservative vision for those welfare state programs that are likely to remain with us, like disability insurance, food stamps and Head Start.

George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” looked like a step in this direction, but it proved to be an empty slogan once the Republican establishment returned to power in 2001. The same will surely happen to Paul Ryan’s more sensible budget ideas if he and Mitt Romney are elected in November. By now conservative intellectuals and media hacks have realized that it’s much easier to run a permanent counterrevolution out of their plush think-tank offices and television studios than to reflect seriously, do homework and cut a deal. All they have to do is spook their troops into believing that the Progressive Idea is still on the march and that they are setting out to meet it at Armageddon. Until then, keep those checks and votes coming in.

The thing is, the conservatives have also spooked themselves. They now really believe the apocalyptic tale they’ve spun, and have placed mild-mannered Barack Obama at the center of it. It hasn’t been easy. Kesler admits that “Obama is at pains to be, and to be seen as, a strong family man, a responsible husband and father urging responsibility on others, a patriot, a model of pre-’60s, subliminally anti-’60s, sobriety.” But that’s just a disguise. In fact, he’s the “latest embodiment of the visionary prophet-statesman” of the Progressives, someone who “sees himself engaged in an epic struggle” whose success will mean “the Swedenization of America.” Or maybe its Harlemization, given that “the black church replaces the Puritans in Obama’s chronicle of American spirituality.” In any case, Barack Obama is, without doubt, the “most left-wing liberal to be elected to national executive office since Henry Wallace.” (Take that, Hubert Humphrey!)

And what is Kesler’s evidence for these extravagant claims? He hasn’t any. Early in the book he writes that Obama came to office planning “bold, systemic changes to energy policy, environmental regulation, taxation, foreign policy” — though he never describes these plans and in fact never mentions them again. He carefully avoids Obama’s moderate record, preferring instead to parse “The Audacity of Hope” for signs of Germanic statism and to cite liberal journalists gushing over the Black Messiah as proof that Obama sees himself that way. It amounts to nothing. By the final chapter, it becomes apparent that Kesler’s whole case against Obama and the liberalism whose “crisis” he quintessences rests on a single piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act of 2010. From Hegel to health care: what could be clearer?

Now, there are many reasons to be worried about the health care act, especially if the system it puts in place proves unmanageable and sours the public further on assertive government action when needed. But it is no reason to pull the fire alarm and declare, as Kesler does, that it is the “latest installment in modern liberalism’s long-running project to change America by changing Americans’ relation to their government” and marks “a new stage in the decline of constitutional government in America.” The Supreme Court has settled the constitutional issue, so now we have to make the thing work. Today’s conservatives, though, are too absorbed with their imaginary world-historical struggle even to change a light bulb. “If Communism, armed with millions of troops and thousands of megatons of nuclear weapons, could collapse, . . . why not American liberalism?” Kesler muses in his final pages. Those are the stakes.

What role does Barack Obama play in that struggle? A rather small one, as this book unintentionally shows. Had the Supreme Court overturned the Affordable Care Act, the right’s fever would not have dropped one degree, nor, I predict, will the patient come to its senses if the president is defeated in November. Is there a doctor in the house? Conservatives need a psychological specialist, someone at the level of the great Jewish sage and sometime physician Maimonides. In the late 12th century Maimonides received a letter from a group of rabbis in Marseille who had worked themselves into a frenzy over astrological predictions of the End Times. His prescription — I translate loosely from the Hebrew — was, Get a grip! “A man should never cast his reason behind him,” he warned, “for the eyes are set in front, not behind.” Excellent advice then, excellent advice now. And it sounds even better in German.

I AM THE CHANGE

Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism

By Charles R. Kesler

276 pp. Broadside Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99

Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. His books include “The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics.”

A version of this review appears in print on September 30, 2012, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Great Disconnect. Today's Paper|Subscribe